Much increased co-operation within Axis countries in technical and tactical matters?

Naval Strategy is built strategy. You need time and Germany went to war well before the Kreigsmarine was ready so in real terms the Kreigsmarine was in a very poor way. Especially if you include the RN and the Marine Nationale and that's not going to end well.

There is literally no way the Kreigsmarine can gain parity with both Navies cos even if the Germans build every ship on the Z plan then the British will always outbuild them.

That's even if Kreigsmarine have the metal and oil even to do that.

Commerce raiding is very much from a position of weakness and not strength but if that's the only game in town then so be it.

Bismarck and Tirpitz maybe the big ticket items but they did little and the Germans went Jeune Ecole in both world wars whether they liked it or no.

The beauty of auxillary cruisers is that they are standard merchant boats that can be converted to warships. That means there should be no obvious clue they exist and so cannot be planned for.

Remember it's very difficult to sink a warship but it's relatively easy to mission kill a warship.

The Bismarck was mission killed when it ruined its own radar....

The Basket said:

The beauty of auxillary cruisers is that they are standard merchant boats that can be converted to warships. That means there should be no obvious clue they exist and so cannot be planned for.

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Any admiralty that was not planning for for commerce raiders should have been taken out and shot for sheer stupidity.
It went back hundreds if not thousands of years. British used it against the Spanish back in the at the time of the Armada. The Confederacy used it against the Union (with ships built in British/French yards). The French and Americans both built special commerce raiding cruisers in the 1890s that were supposed to "resemble" an unknown liner at a distance.
Germans used 16 Auxiliary cruisers/commerce raiders in WW I.

What may be hidden is the number available, but even that can be guessed at with some "detective" work looking at "available" ships. While liners make passable auxiliary cruisers with their high speed they make lousy commerce raiders because they were coal (or oil) hogs and need frequent refueling. Once you go through the lists and throw out most of the old ships and most of the ones under a certain size and most of the ones over a certain size and the ones that are too slow and the ones that are too old you can get at least a manageable list.

The Basket said:

Remember it's very difficult to sink a warship but it's relatively easy to mission kill a warship.

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It is also easy to mission kill an auxiliary warship. A mission killed warship might be put right in a shipyard in few days or weeks. If it stopped the raider from sinking the convoy ships then it completed it's mission even if it does need a shipyard. Convoy escorts seldom operated alone and auxiliary cruisers seldom operated in groups unless one ship was a lot weaker than the other.

The auxiliary warship is almost dead if it gets "mission killed" as it's mission was months long ( a few went around a year/). It has no (or very few) repair facilities available. A prolonged gun dual burns ammo the auxiliary cruiser will have trouble replacing.

The Germans in WW II had both auxiliary warships for use in far waters that could draw off escorts and convertial warships for raids into the North Atlantic forcing constant escorting by ships capable of facing the larger German ships. No German battleships means the British can park several old battleships and use the manpower and fuel other places,
What the exact mix should be I don't know but stopping construction of any and all heavy units in the mid to late 30s would have been a gift to the British.

If the British were ready for auxillary cruisers then they had a strange way of showing it! Ships like Atlantis and Pinguin ran up big scores before they were put down.

Odd point but RN had 15 Big Gun Capital Ships in 1939 although that was reduced to 14 soon after....by a submarine....cough.

So I am up against Scharnhorst so which of the big ships can I use? Not Nelrod, not the Rs and not the QEs as they are all too slow. Do I risk Renown and Repulse? I guess but I aint liking it. So I am left with Hood as the only Capital ship fast enough and armoured enough so 1 out of 15 is hardly a good ratio! This is why Hood was never refit cos it was the only truly capable ship out there and so had to be available.

My view is Germany is not a naval power. France had a powerful navy but it mattered zero when the Germans walked into Paris. Every extra Bismarck is a tank less or a gallon of petrol less to the army and the army was where the show was.

Japan and Britain needed a strong Navy yes but because they are island nations so need a strong navy.

The Nazi future was the road to Moscow. Not the Atlantic.

All a German Navy would need to do is control the Baltic and stop a battleship or monitor parking itself 10 miles of the coast and playing bombardment.

You are looking at it like a scoreboard, and ignoring what it cost the British to counter the German ships.
Many convoys were escorted by an R class or QEs in case the German ships came out. The British battleship doesn't have to chase down the German battleship/s. It just has to keep the German ship/s from shooting up the convoy. Place itself between the German ship/s and convoy and force the Germans to either fight or go around while the British ship/s operate on interior lines. The provision of large escort ships burned 10s of thousands of tons of fuel oil during the war, it kept thousands of men (if not over 10,000) on the big old ships and not on escorts or in the army. Ships in use, even if they do not contact the enemy require repair and refit, especially 20 year old ships. This sucked up darkyard time and space. The German ships tied up quite a bit of British effort.

One of the questions was wither doubling or tripling the amount of armed merchant ships the the German used as raiders would have sucked up twice or three times the amount of effort to track them down. One to two raiders in the south atlantic may take quite a bit of searching to find. Four or six in the same area might lead to several german losses fairly quickly.


And if the old battleship gets lucky and damages the Germans ships propulsion, steering or even just messes up the bow reducing speed/seaworthiness the German ship needs to run for port, raiding is finished until repairs.



You are also ignoring Norway. While the Kriegsmarine had very significant losses in the Norwegian campaign it would have been impossible with only merchant ships or converted merchant ships. Germans don't take most of Norway??? No iron ore shipments in the winter time. How many tanks now? Germans aren't in a position to block the Murmansk convoys.

Germans cannot hole up in the Baltic and expose the Dutch, North West German coast to British naval raids or coastal convoy attacks.

Once again, the Germans cannot hide the fact that they are not building big ships and building submarines instead and have the British alter their building programs accordingly.

The German Raiders Komet and Orion had a pretty good run in the Pacific.

The Orion also has the distinction of having the only Japaneae aircraft operated by the Luftwaffe: a Nakajima E8N scouting aircraft.

BTW according to this website Bismarck Armour Protection

The Bismarck used 19,082 mt of armour material in it's construction. including ( but not limited to?)

• St 52 KM. Construction grade steel with a tensile strength of 52-64 kg/mm², a strain of 21% and a yield point of 36-38 kg/mm². This material was used for plates with a minimum thickness of 4 mm. Thinner surfaces used St 42 KM.
  KC n/A (Krupp Cemented, new type). Face-hardened armour steel. This material contained 3.5-3.8% nickel, 2% chrome, 0.3% carbon, 0.3% manganese, and 0.2% molybdenum, and it was used for the side belt, turrets, barbettes, and conning towers. The 670 Brinell face-layer tapered in hardness as it extended into 40-50% of the plate's total thickness. Post WWII proving ground test indicated that KC was only slightly less resistant than British cemented armour (CA), and markedly superior to US Class A plates.
  Wh n/A (Wotan hart, new type). Homogeneous armour steel with a tensile strength of 85-95 kg/mm², a strain of 20% and a yield point of 50-55 kg/mm². This material was used for the armoured decks, and, in the thickness employed aboard the Bismarck, was the equal of most foreign homogeneous plates.
  Ww n/A (Wotan weich, new type). Homogeneous armour steel with a tensile strength of 65-75 kg/mm², a strain of 25% and a yield point of 38-40 kg/mm². This material was used for the longitudinal torpedo bulkheads.

How much of this material is directly comparable to tank armor I don't know but you are not going get anywhere near the amount of tanks that counting the tonnage of the ship might indicate.

I hold my view that the war was fought in the East as a Land campaign. So every spoon and ivory back scratcher spent on the Navy is hindering Barbarossa.

So the need for battleships is very small.

The British would have to counter the new French, Italian, American and Japanese battleships anyhoo so even if the Kreigsmarine built canoes, the RN would have to match the Littorios and the Richelieus.

When I was young so much younger than today....I read an excellent book on the German auxillary cruisers. Apart from Ruckteschell, they all seemed a top bunch of fellas. Kapitan Rogge was a leader who you could follow.

Felt sad when Atlantis was sunk...damn you Royal Navy!

Shortround6 said:

BTW according to this website Bismarck Armour Protection

The Bismarck used 19,082 mt of armour material in it's construction. including ( but not limited to?)

• St 52 KM. Construction grade steel with a tensile strength of 52-64 kg/mm², a strain of 21% and a yield point of 36-38 kg/mm². This material was used for plates with a minimum thickness of 4 mm. Thinner surfaces used St 42 KM.
  KC n/A (Krupp Cemented, new type). Face-hardened armour steel. This material contained 3.5-3.8% nickel, 2% chrome, 0.3% carbon, 0.3% manganese, and 0.2% molybdenum, and it was used for the side belt, turrets, barbettes, and conning towers. The 670 Brinell face-layer tapered in hardness as it extended into 40-50% of the plate's total thickness. Post WWII proving ground test indicated that KC was only slightly less resistant than British cemented armour (CA), and markedly superior to US Class A plates.
  Wh n/A (Wotan hart, new type). Homogeneous armour steel with a tensile strength of 85-95 kg/mm², a strain of 20% and a yield point of 50-55 kg/mm². This material was used for the armoured decks, and, in the thickness employed aboard the Bismarck, was the equal of most foreign homogeneous plates.
  Ww n/A (Wotan weich, new type). Homogeneous armour steel with a tensile strength of 65-75 kg/mm², a strain of 25% and a yield point of 38-40 kg/mm². This material was used for the longitudinal torpedo bulkheads.

How much of this material is directly comparable to tank armor I don't know but you are not going get anywhere near the amount of tanks that counting the tonnage of the ship might indicate.

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It might be worth noting that ST 52 was (is) a construction steel rather than an armour steel. The story is interesting and suggests how Germany could have helped Japan. However, to be useful the help would have to occur around 1935-6 rather than later.

The KMs K Class cruisers, commissioned 1929-30, included significant welding and the result was a disaster. For example, Karlsruhe's visit to Japan in 1936 was followed by storm damage that it was feared might lead to the cruiser breaking up https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc500129/m2/1/high_res_d/dissertation.pdf.

Similarly, the IJN had welded much of the hull of the minelayer Yaeyama, launched in 1931, and all of submarine tender Taigei, launched in 1933. However, distortion was serious for Yaeyama and disastrous for Taigei. The 4th Fleet Incident of 1935 revealed further problems http://www.shippai.org/fkd/en/hfen/HB1011022.pdf. Thus 1936 saw a return to riveting for critical regions of ship's structure.

However, by 1936 German research had produced a steel, ST 52, which had similar strength to the D steel (Ducol) used by Britain and Japan and was not very expensive but which, unlike D steel, could be welded without the heat treatment creating regions of greatly reduced elongation around the weld.

After 1941, when Germany and Japan were allies, Germany did pass details of its welding methods to Japan. One can find statements that Germany taught Japan how to weld ship's hulls ("Deutsche Ingenieure in Japan, japanische Ingenieure in Deutschland in der Zwischenkriegszeit" by Erich Pauer, Japan Journal for Science, Technology & Society, vol 4, 1995, possibly on page 308 according to "Japan and Germany in the Modern World" by Bernd Martin). Unfortunately, there are few details in the American reports on German-Japanese cooperation. However, there may be a critical detail on page 14 of http://www.fischer-tropsch.org/primary_documents/gvt_reports/USNAVY/USNTMJ Reports/USNTMJ-200G-0085-0145 Report S-01-3.pdf that Japan was beginning to use St 52. The use X-rays of test welds was certainly a German contribution to Japan.

Although the American reports suggest that American welding was better than German in WW2, the low cost St 52 was adopted after WW2 as the standard steel for merchant ships.

Clearly Japan might have benefited more from the German research in the mid 30s than in the mid 40s.

The Basket said:

I hold my view that the war was fought in the East as a Land campaign. So every spoon and ivory back scratcher spent on the Navy is hindering Barbarossa.

So the need for battleships is very small.

The British would have to counter the new French, Italian, American and Japanese battleships anyhoo so even if the Kreigsmarine built canoes, the RN would have to match the Littorios and the Richelieus.

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Every tank, airplane, artillery shell, tin of canned meat and gallon of gasoline that reached Murmansk would hinder Barbarossa. The Germans need some way (or more accurately, several ways) of limiting both the flow of supplies to England and the flow of supplies to the Soviet Union once Barbarossa starts. If the Germans have no surface fleet then arctic convoys do not need cruiser and battleship escorts. Frees up men, repair capability and thousands of tons (tens of thousands) of oil used to keep several of the old Rs in service. No German surface fleet allows some British cruisers to deployed elsewhere.

See: Revenge-class battleship - Wikipedia
for just a brief history of the R class in WW II.

andit is not just battleships but the large number of cruisers I listed earlier. Without Germany building the Battleships and cruisers it did the "R" might have gone to the breakers as the KG Vs came on line (or been used as barracks ships). Germany needs some sort of surface fleet or units to pin some of the British ships inplace to prevent them from being used elsewhere.


RN finishes off the Italian fleet with the assets that were deployed elsewhere to guard against German breakouts? Italians kicked out of NA in 1940/41? Barbarossa's southern flank exposed? Crete does not fall and the Romanian oil fields are in danger from British bombers in the Eastern Med?

Obviously the Germans could not plan for most of that but leaving the Italians to provide the Naval Forces for the axis in the west was not a good option.
The Italians didn't even join the war until France was nearly beaten.
Getting Italian ships past Gibraltar might be a tad difficult.

By the late 1930s it was not the Royal Navy vs everyone else. It was the RN vs one or two other countries of which the US was not going to be one. The French Richelieus were built to counter the Italian Littorios, the French Dunkerque and sister were built to overmatch the German pocket battleships and Italian heavy cruisers.
Due to the naval treaties (and money and shipyard space) the British, French and Italians built NO 8 in gun cruisers after the early 30s. Perhaps if they hadn't built new battleships they might have built large cruisers?

Perhaps the Tirpitz was a waste of resources, perhaps not. Perhaps the Bismarck should have been a Scharnhorst with three twin 38cm turrets. But the Germans had to have a surface fleet that could threaten the British Supply routes in addition to just using submarines in order to complicate the British defence/escort problem.

People want to take the advantages of canceling programs and/or units. They seldom want to pay the cost

Few points
The Panzerschiffe and the light cruisers are not Nazi era but Weimar era so the RN would still have to counter plus the Auxiliary Cruisers.

So you only talking Scharnhorst, Tirpitz, Bismarck and Gneisenau as battleships. The Scharnhorst 11 inch guns are not getting through the belt armour of any big gun battleship. So that leaves the 15 inch gun ships and that's not much.

I mean PQ17 was saved from Tirpitz so that's good.

Battleships were the bling of Naval Warfare and so regardless of actual combat effectiveness or cost, it was the status symbol of its day. The only true RN battleship ordered in war was Vanguard and that was constantly delayed as the surface fleet of the Axis was resolved by the legacy ships. So if the German battleships were trying to take resources away from escorts then didn't work.

The 5 KGV was going to happen anyway and the only change was the 4 Rs were kept in service. The Rs were used as merchant escorts because a merchant ship was the only slower ship on the seas!

Auxillary Cruisers are stealthy.

Problem with your Bismarck is that's it's Bismarck shaped. So it's not going to be mistaken for a row boat.

If memory serves, Komet was asked twice by British warships and Komet was like....No Germans here Guv'nor....and was let off.

I've noticed a distinct family resemblance of the Kriegsmarine capital ships. Prinz Eugen was almost Bismarck shaped, certainly close enough to fool HMS Hood. I believe that was deliberately done to complicate identification of their units.

Few points

The Panzerschiffe and the light cruisers are not Nazi era but Weimar era so the RN would still have to counter plus the Auxiliary Cruisers.

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The Light cruisers have the endurance/range of a bottle rocket. Leaves the Panzerschiffe heavy cruisers.

So you only talking Scharnhorst, Tirpitz, Bismarck and Gneisenau as battleships. The Scharnhorst 11 inch guns are not getting through the belt armour of any big gun battleship. So that leaves the 15 inch gun ships and that's not much.

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The 11 guns can go through the deck armor of most of the old battleships and the belt armor of the Repulse and Renown. The only capitol ships as fast as the Scharnhorst class aside from Hood.

The Basket said:

The 5 KGV was going to happen anyway and the only change was the 4 Rs were kept in service. The Rs were used as merchant escorts because a merchant ship was the only slower ship on the seas!

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Anson and Howe weren't completed until the middle of 1942 and the Lion and Temeraire were broken up on the slips.

The Basket said:

Auxillary Cruisers are stealthy.

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Yes they are but stealth won't stop the Murmansk convoys.
Looking for the Auxiliary cruisers was like looking for a needle in a haystack, but if you put a lot more needles in the hay stack your odds of finding one (or a few) go up.
And again, you only need small cruisers to counter auxiliary cruisers, or even large destroyers (couple of Tribals vs an Auxiliary cruiser? )

So let's say it's 1933 and the Kreigsmarine look at it's navy. It's got pre-dreads light cruises and the Panzerschiffe. If you look at the invasion of Norway the bulk of the invasion fleet was pre Nazi and so would exist regardless. I would still have destroyers and subs so the only thing missing would be the Scharnhorsts and the Hippers. Although would have made new light cruisers and call them destroyer flotilla leaders so the loss of the Hippers no big deal but the Scharnhorsts wouldn't be there. So two Sydneys rather than 2 Hippers.

Deal breaker? Does the Norwegian campaign fail on this point?

It was the U boat and Luftwaffe stopping the convoys.

Would I send the Panzerschiffe and light cruisers out on commerce raids? Probably not. I need to control the Baltic so that's where my concern is.

The Lion class was un-needed unless you count Yamato. Had the RN known about the full capacity of Yamato then I would expect some response.

When the RN heard of the Scharnhorsts they took a don't know don't care approach and certainly no panic new program. One could say Vanguard was an attrition replacement rather than a new battleship.

The Basket said:

Naval Strategy is built strategy. You need time and Germany went to war well before the Kreigsmarine was ready

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Had Germany waited until say Sept 1941 to invade Poland, would the KM be any better off? Presumably Graf Zeppelin, Tirpitz and Bismarck have entered service, but so have four if not all six RN armoured fleet carriers and four if not all five KGV battleships. The French military will have had time to improve, including completing both Richelieu class, and having the latest Dewoitine and Arsenel fighters in wider service. Germany would have more U-Boats, but the RN also now has more destroyers. And without France or Norway in German hands, those U-Boats have very limited access to the North Sea and Atlantic.

The thread is about 'tactical and technical' matters. Postponing the war is a strategic matter.

Problem is that to reach parity with the RN alone, the Germans are going to need 20 big gun battleships!

Unless you have a magic wand that's just crazy.

That's not including the French and the USA. Or the fact the British are going to build even more battleships!

So you're going to bankrupt your economy by hoping the British bankrupt theirs?

The Reichsmarschall wants a word!

I am familiar with naval history and I ain't feeling it bro.

Not even the Imperial Japanese Navy had that many Battleships...

The Basket said:

Problem is that to reach parity with the RN alone, the Germans are going to need 20 big gun battleships!

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GrauGeist said:

Not even the Imperial Japanese Navy had that many Battleships...

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No one did. Britain got close, 5xKGV, 5xQE, 5xR and 2xN. They'll need to front their 3xBC to make up the numbers, but I don't want to be on Renown when facing Bismarck.

The British lost 5 big gun ships so they didn't get the full score but add Vanguard and it's a fair bet that Germany would be facing 20 big gun ships. They don't but you would have to plan if they did.

I would call Hood a fast battleship rather than a Battlecruiser and Renown and Repulse who fair powerful.